My personal observations suggest that there are two mindsets that may be hurting your dating life: 1. assuming too much and too soon; 2. generalizing and stereotyping way too much. Both of these mindsets are particularly harmful because they affect every stage of men women’s dating life – from meeting guys and having that first converasation with a new guy or first date to going out and entering into relationships.
Assuming Too Much
A woman who assumes too much is very likely to dismiss guys prematurely, before she even knows anything about them. She is the one who is going to look at a photo of the guy who her friend is trying to introduce her to and is going to decide that she is not interested in him, because he is not your type, even though that guy may not be bad looking at all. She is the same girl who might ask her friend who is trying to set her up with a guy a bunch of questions about him and thenĀ decided to not even meet him because of his height, or where he is from, or what he does for a living. She is the one who must have forgotten that when it come to dating, checklists simply don’t work because they don’t accurately represent who that other person is, and more importantly – these checklists will never tell you how you will feel about the guy once you meet him and get to know him.
Generalizing and Stereotyping
This is yet another way to miss out on meeting and dating great guys. You may have gone out with a guy of a particular race or nationality or profession, and you have decided to never date another guy who belongs to the same group just because you found your interaction with one member of that group to be disappointing. I can’t remember how many times I heard a girl say: “I am never dating another ….. again.” There is no need to explain why it would be wrong to make such sweeping generalizations. Interestingly enough, positive generalizations are equally false. Just because you fell in love with one architect or one Hungarian guy, doesn’t mean that you are going to like every Hungarian man or every other architect, although that’s not impossible either.
The main problem with both generalizing and stereotyping is that it makes you dismiss so many men for no rational reason, and chances are that it makes you passĀ on some great guys out there for no good reason. Generilizing and assuming are our natural human tendencies. We like the idea of finding rules and patterns, as it makes our life easier and it also justifies our behavior. We want to know that if this happens, that that must follow, as this cause-effect relationship helps us understand the world better. However, when it comes to attraction and romantic chemistry, how and what we feel toward others doesn’t always obey the laws of cause and effect. On the contrary – often, how we feel is inapposite of how we think we should feel about a person. We are not machines; we are more thanĀ the sum of our parts, andĀ asĀ such – ourĀ feelings, our attraction and our romantic interest is determined by more than just the objective qualities and traits that we think we are looking for.